Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts

Monday, August 2, 2010

To India, With Love

India is unfathomably beautiful, isn't it? I wish I could wear henna on my hands all of the time - it's the most unique and beautiful (and wearable) art. The luxuriously bright colors, stacks of gold bangles, flowers and stones - I wish we all dress like we lived in the ideal India (or at least 1967, when they all pretended to live in India). I know that this country is stricken with such intense poverty, and I don't want to perpetuate the perfect image that Bollywood films show India to be, but I've seen the loveliness of this country and it's all around.

Despite how beautiful India is, I'm glad to be back blogging.

Take a cinematic trip to India when Eat Pray Love comes out in two weeks. Is anyone else as excited to see the Pretty Woman herself on a worldwide adventure?

Sunday, February 7, 2010

"models don't look like rabbits"

When I find myself in times of (inspirational) trouble, I always tend to turn to my favorite muse, the beautiful Miss Boyd. I haven't posted any pictures of Pattie in a while, so I figured now was as good a time as any to share some of my favorite looks of hers. This collage is rather India-heavy because I also found out today that I will be spending this summer in India. I am so excited, but I hope it won't interfere too much with blogging.

Anyway, I am also looking to find a new book to read. I'm finishing up "A Day in the Life" and am searching around Amazon for an interesting read. Any suggestions?

Saturday, June 20, 2009

jennifer juniper, hair of golden flax, jennifer juniper, longs for what she lacks, do you like her? yes I do sir, would you love her? yes i would sir

Jenny Boyd, the younger sister of Pattie, was born in November 1947 as Helen Mary Boyd. Pattie chose instead to call her Jenny after one of her favorite dolls. Jenny spent the first six years of her life living with her family in Kenya, until moving back to London in the mid-50s. While still in school, she followed in her older sister’s footsteps and Jenny became a model in London.
Jenny met Mick Fleetwood in the mid-sixties when she was still a teenager, starting what would become an on-off relationship between the pair for the next two decades. In his autobiography, Mick recalled his early relationship with Jenny, “I’d see Jenny coming home from school, a stunning 15-year-old in white stockings. I lost my heart to her immediately. I had a massive crush on her, but was so shy I couldn’t say anything to her. I knew then, at age 16, that this was the girl I was destined to marry.” Mick and Jenny first began dating in 1965, only to break up during the summer of 1966. Jenny recalled that “I met someone in Rome and became involved. I told Mick when I got home and he got really upset. It was a very big breakup.”
In 1966, Jenny began using marijuana and experimenting with LSD. Describing an experience with the drug, Jenny said that she had “an astonishing realization, which I can now identify as a spiritual awakening. The traditional Christian beliefs I had been taught as a child crumbled as I suddenly recognized that there was no God above or hell below. God was everywhere, inside each one of us. I saw everything as a circle – life, death, and rebirth, or reincarnation.”
In 1967 Jenny relocated from London to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, where Pattie and George famously visited her. The following year, she moved back to England. In 1968 she went with Pattie and the Beatles to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to study transcendental meditation. While in India, Donovan arrived reportedly in pursuit of Jenny. Donovan met her in late 1967 and fell in love with her, writing the number 5 hit song “Jennifer Juniper” about her. Donovan recalled in his autobiography that “Jenny was a fair-haired English rose. So young-looking was she that I felt like I was about to rob the cradle. I was also attracted to Patti, but she was with George. Jenny had her sister’s manner – a middle-class maid with long, silky hair and bright, curious eyes – and she was obviously attracted to me. We would sit and look at the spiritual books that George and I were studying that year.” They had a brief relationship, but apparently his gesture didn’t take, as Jenny told him that she wasn’t interested in having a serious boyfriend at that point.
Jenny later would share an apartment with Magic Alex, who worked in the Apple Electronics division of Apple Corps, and she ran the boutique Juniper and the Apple Boutique in London.
Once again living in London, Jenny began a relationship again with Mick Fleetwood. Dating for two years, they were married on June 12, 1970. Seven months later, they welcomed a daughter Amy Rose in January 1971. Two years later, the couple had another daughter Lucy. Jenny’s relationship with Mick allowed her to witness firsthand the many changes in Fleetwood Mac. She saw the declines of both Peter Green and Danny Kirwan from the band from drug abuse, and saw the additions of Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, and Lindsey Buckingham. In 1974, before Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, Mick and Jenny relocated in Los Angeles. Feeling out of place in L.A., where Fleetwood Mac was quickly rising in popularity, Jenny tried to find solace in religion and her children, but eventually fell toward cocaine and alcohol – two things readily available in her husband’s music scene. As Mick was on tour with the band the majority of the time, the marriage crumbled, leading Jenny to return to England to live with Pattie (who was by then living with Eric Clapton) for a few months. Jenny later returned to L.A. and moved back in with Mick, remarrying him in 1976. Despite their renewed relationship, the troubles between Mick and Jenny didn’t go away. With the release of the album Rumours, which made Mick an international star, Jenny once again turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with the friction and distance in her marriage. She broke her addictions in early 1977, but this wasn’t enough to help the marriage. Jenny filed for divorce six months later.
After moving back to England in 1978 with her two daughters, Jenny met Ian Wallace, a drummer known for his gigs in Snape and King Crimson during the mid-seventies. The two married in 1984. Jenny then sought her bachelor’s degree in humanities at Ryokan College before earning her masters in counseling psychology and her PhD in psychology at UCLA. Jenny is now an author and clinical psychologist, and published a book in 1992 about psychology and music, called, “Musicians in Tune.”

Saturday, February 7, 2009

The Pattie Chronicles: 1968 Style

For the early part of 1968, Pattie rocked the “Ashram chic” look. “We just wore very simple outfits,” Pattie said in 2006 about the clothing in India. “The kurta, which is a long skirt, with long pajama trousers. We hardly went out of the ashram because we were too busy meditating, so tailors would be brought in and the same kurta-and-pajama look would be made again and again. I used to send frantic postcards from India to the Beatles’ management, asking them to buy me a pair of shoes or a dress that I’d seen in a magazine because none of these things were within my grasp. I’d suddenly imagine something I wanted, such as a pair of clear plastic high-heeled shoes, or I’d send Ossie Clark a card asking him to make me a silk bikini — ridiculous things like that. Our dress was so simplified, I thought it would be nice to wear a bikini or high heels for a change.”
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